


the shepherd’s folly

by ifyouresure



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2019-08-07 15:11:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16410854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifyouresure/pseuds/ifyouresure
Summary: Oksana watches, and she waits – for what, Eve’s not sure.





	1. seul, pendant un instant

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [poem 47](https://archive.org/stream/greekanthology03newyuoft#page/26/mode/2up) of _The Greek Anthology_ , vol. III.
> 
> Each chapter title is a musical direction in _Gnossienne_ No. 3 by Erik Satie.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (alone, for a moment)

Truth be told, once the adrenaline wears off, her elbow hurts like hell.

 

 

“I’ve never done anything like this before.”

The silence in the flat is delicate, floating among the detritus of sounds past, of shattering champagne bottles and clothes hangers clattering against the floor, of the thunderous beat of her heart. If she listens closely, Eve can just pick out the slightly laboured sound of Oksana’s breathing, shuddering past what the prison back in Russia reports are multiple bone fractures and several bruised ribs.

Her heart is calm, now – the fading baseline in their final symphony. Eve’s grip is tight on the knife, thumb stroking a domed pin in the handle, over, under, around. The point presses precariously into the soft part of her thigh, the edge of the blade skating harmlessly over the fabric of her pocket along her hip. She won’t let it slip, not this time.

On the other side of the bed, Oksana’s lips are―god, what had Eve said to that sketch artist?―full, so full when she moves closer, level with her own when the cut in Oksana’s top lip splits open. A fat bead of blood begins to gather at the corner, vivid against her pale skin. It must hurt, but Oksana pays it no mind. Totally focused.

Even now, with one side of her face all swollen and the shadows under her eyes deep and fathomless, Eve can’t bring herself to think of Oksana as ugly. She’s so alive, under the blood and the bruises and the pale pink sweep of her shirt. Her eyes are alight with purpose, pupils wide in the late afternoon sun. The movement of her body is almost fluid when she shuffles closer, like someone trying not to spook a skittish animal, bone fractures be damned.

She’s perfect, despite the mess they’ve made of her. Despite the mess she made of Bill.

_It’s worse when I push it through slowly_ , Eve recites to herself, eyes catching on that stupid flower of red, _it’s worse when I push it through slowly_.

“It’s okay,” Oksana says.

It’s all rather quick, in the end.

 

 

There’s a woman, at the airport, when Eve is getting out of her taxi. A moment.

Eve follows her with her eyes, sways on the spot and nearly walks into the slow-moving departures traffic to an angry chorus of car horns.

“Sorry, sorry!” she shouts when she finally rips her attention away from that blonde hair, her slim silhouette. Eve hurries to the closest bench, sits down and presses the heels of her hands into her eyes hard. They tremble against her face. It wasn’t so long ago that they were covered in someone else’s blood.

Jesus. It couldn’t be her anyway, she’s hurt, possibly _dead_. Jesus.

Eve pieces herself back together and moves on.

It’s typical, that the day she’s meant to put Paris behind her, the airline Eve booked her ticket with goes on strike.

The Charles de Gaulle concourse is bloated with stranded travelers and airline employees, and her shoulder aches where frenzied passersby stumbling over her cabin bag have yanked at it. The nearest customer service booth has people lined up all the way down the foyer and, when she calls, she’s thirty-fourth in the queue waiting for an airline representative.

God, Eve hates Europe.

She walks out after another asshole kicks her suitcase out of her hand – just barges her way through the crowd. Walking with purpose, she cuts a path to the exit and, to her surprise, people part for her, skipping out of her way just like that. Easy as arranging the absolute-last-minute flight from Moscow to Paris had been. Eve remembers the hotel receptionist in Russia and thinks maybe it hasn’t always been Niko holding her back.

For a moment, she considers simply abandoning her bag here in the pick-up area and shaking her arms out without looking back, but then Eve wonders at the implications of unattended luggage in a busy airport. Thinks of the suitcase filled with clothes she has stowed away under her bed at home, tags still on.

Better to take it with her.

Eve takes the rail back to London instead, splurges on business class even though it’s only a two-hour trip. The champagne isn’t very good but there aren’t any delays, and there’s already a taxi waiting for her when she walks up to the curb in London.

Officially, Kenny says, Carolyn’s been sent to head a classified operation in the east. He and Elena are still holed up in the little office Carolyn first put them up in when Eve finally clunks her way up to their floor, straight from the railway station with her suitcase; they’re all ready to leave the moment Carolyn’s diary indicates she’s back in London, but Eve likes the idea of sticking it to her in this small way in the meantime.

“Unofficially,” Kenny says, fidgeting and standing a little ways away while Elena gathers her up in a tight and much-needed hug, “I’ve had probes set up ever since everything with Frank went down, and there’s very little on file about her new assignment.”

“And the chances her going away has anything to do with Konstantin’s body dropping off the face of the Earth are …”

“Pretty damn high,” Elena answers, “if their letters are anything to go off of.” Kenny grimaces.

“Nothing yet about Villanelle either,” he says, only returning to his seat once Eve is settled. “We don’t even know if she’s still alive,” he adds, which makes Eve jerk involuntarily. “And there’s nothing to suggest either of them have gone overseas, but―”

“They could be anywhere.” Eve sighs. She really hates Europe.

The atmosphere in the room turns depressing. Eve thinks she catches Kenny and Elena exchanging a glance. Kenny starts to fidget again.

“By the way,” Elena begins, addressing Kenny with some false cheer, and god, Eve loves her, “have you got any other secret family members that’ll hire us in an official capacity?” She turns to Eve. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love this job, but I’m going to need to find another one soon if it doesn’t start paying.”

Elena has just finished speaking when there’s a knock on the door. Kenny goes to answer it, and then the Deputy Director of MI6 is on their doorstep.

Twenty minutes later, Eve has a new job. Just like that, she thinks. Easy.

They hear the door slam shut downstairs through the thin floors when Jerry from MI6 leaves the building. Elena says, faintly, “What the fuck.”

“Yeah.” Eve throws her head back and laughs out of sheer disbelief. “Monthly Martens dinner parties aren’t a potluck situation are they, Kenny? I can’t cook to save my life.”

“Can I just bring a bottle of wine off our new budget?”

Eve grins. “Piss off.”

“So is there anything else you want to tell us?” Elena asks Kenny. “Just so I know what I’m getting myself into.” Kenny sends her an alarmed look. Elena looks around at Eve. “Bugger.”

Eve laughs again.

 

 

She’s flying to Russia in first class the very next day. Jerry sends an interpreter and Elena tags along.

“I’ve been bored as hell back in London and this is the safest time to be in the country, isn’t it? I probably won’t ever get another chance like this with Villanelle and Konstantin both out of commission.” They have the money anyway, and Eve can’t argue with that.

They’re going back to square one in their investigation: trying to learn everything there is to know about Oksana, starting with her prison record. Jerry from MI6 is content with Eve’s explanation that they’ll find Carolyn and The Twelve if they get to Oksana first, is happy to let Eve take the reins.

“But don’t try to kill her this time,” Jerry says, half-joking and completely certain Oksana is still alive, “we still need to interrogate her.”

During his pitch the day before, he’d hinted that he thinks this operation will probably take several months, maybe years, not knowing how deep the corruption runs up MI6 and unable to provide the trusted manpower a team like this would normally get.

Years, Eve thinks, _years_ , job security, and chasing one person for the rest of her life. Eve remembers Anna, alone and haunted for years by the letters and clothes she wouldn’t throw away, by the spectre of a girl she thought she once knew. Had she hoped Oksana was still alive, too?

The little village Oksana grew up in is anonymous enough that it doesn’t show up on most of the maps Elena has looked up for Eve. It’s small and unassuming, the sort of thing you see in films, and when they arrive the winter gloom has cast the town in an almost desolate glow. It’s hard to imagine Oksana, so bright and alive and larger than life, in this village, growing up, playing like a regular child; it seems to Eve that Oksana has always been this way, as though she came into this world already fully-formed and extraordinary. Jerry from MI6 is holding on to some small hope that Oksana, at her weakest and most vulnerable, will return to her roots, but Eve already knows they won’t find her here. Not in any real way that matters.

They stay for three days, driving to the city at night to sleep in their hotel rooms and driving back to town every morning. They go from door to door asking after Oksana, nodding through gossip and following tips deeper and deeper into the village. Most of the townspeople say that the Astankovas were fine people, that Oksana was so sweet growing up, and oh, what a shame it was when she was sent away, but little things crop up that call back to the prison record Eve has a copy of sitting on the nightstand in her hotel room.

There are whispers of tragic accidents, of a drowned child and a birdhouse that went up in flames.

Lovely, hard-working parents, and a sweet, difficult child who couldn’t be controlled, but what child could?

On their second day in the village, one young woman with a glass eye and a large scar running down her cheek slams the door in Eve’s face without a word when their interpreter says Oksana’s name. It’s the older residents who were more enamoured with the young Oksana, who more easily forgive her indiscretions, the younger ones who are less sure. But most all of them seem to have some instinctual fear of her; their eyes jump to the dark corners of their homes when they talk about her, voices turn defensive when Eve pushes for more. It’s been over a decade since she last stepped foot in this village, and she was only a teenager then, but Oksana’s memory still casts a shadow like a physical thing over it, felt in every family and every home. Oksana didn’t get very good at the hiding-in-plain-sight part of being a psychopath until she was older, Eve supposes.

On their third and final day, they visit the plot of land where Oksana’s childhood home once stood. Its charred remains still stand in some semblance of a house so many years later, as though even the forces of nature can't bear to touch them; they jut from the frozen ground like broken bones, stark white under a fresh blanket of snow.

“We weren’t very close,” their interpreter says for the local music teacher, while one of her students plunks away at the piano in the other room. “I was older, and I gave the younger girls instrument lessons. She was a very proud child, stubborn, but charming. She always begged to go with me when I went away for university.”

“She was mean girl. Bad heart,” says her fiancé in his own broken English.

“It was never proven, but yes, I think she set that fire. That poor girl, poor Oksana. She was so troubled,” says their interpreter.

“Her mother was inside house when she put fire,” says the fiancé.

 

 

The chickens out back aren’t dying when Eve returns to London, and their eggs have all been collected. Niko is not home, waiting by the door like she half-expects. She hasn’t called him since Russia the first time around, and hasn’t told him she’s been back in the country. Eve is almost disappointed: in him, for not wanting to try, for ceding their house to her; in herself, for actually wanting him there.

Almost, anyway.

Eve puts her suitcase away, checks the other is still under her bed _just_ to reassure herself, and runs a bath for herself. She sheds her clothes and wades into the water, washing the traces of a day of traveling from her body, the pains and pleasures of several months. It’s been a while since Eve spent any real time in this house.

Alone, finally, Eve’s thoughts drift toward that afternoon in Paris as she’s so desperately wanted to let them for the last week, ignoring the panic that instantly takes hold in her chest. She remembers the feeling of a weapon in her grip. The give of a warm body beneath hers. The slip-slide of someone else’s blood, wet on her hands.

This is what Oksana does.

The last time Oksana was here, this bathroom had seemed much larger, more splendid, even though the lights had been off and Eve had spent most of the occasion flat on her back, hips pinched between the sides of the tub and Oksana’s knees. Eve remembers how she’d crowded her in against the ice box in the kitchen, the magnets and clips that dug into her spine. Recalls the point of the steak knife Oksana had ghosted over the dip in her collarbone. Eve presses her own thumb nail into her chest hard in a gross imitation of Oksana, until a half moon cuts into her skin and it aches tenderly.

This is what Oksana has done. Eve’s hand slips under the water.

_It’s worse when I push it through slowly_ , she thinks, finger press, press, pressing, _it’s worse when I push it through slowly._

The perfume under her bed calls to her.

 

 

Blood isn’t so different from paint, once it’s dried. It becomes a thing unreal, imagined.

She’s running for the streets outside Oksana’s flat as soon as she realizes she’s gone, lungs burning, heart racing, but Oksana is nowhere in sight. The woman who owns the apartment building only saw her stumble down the stairs, doesn’t know where she actually could have gone. There’s no blood trail, which is reassuring, but Oksana had a gun on her, which is not. She probably could have talked a passing car into driving her to the nearest hospital. She probably could have done it without the gun.

Eve calls the police first, and then she checks her phone. Dozens of messages and missed calls.

When Elena picks up, she says, “Eve! Thank god―Kenny, I’ve got her! Where the fuck are you? You had Kenny worried sick, why haven’t you been answering your damn phone?”

“Elena," Eve says, and something in her voice must hint at the urgency of the call because Elena quiets immediately, "I need you to get Kenny to tap into every hospital near Villanelle’s flat right now. Tell him to look out for people coming into the ER with stab wounds.”

“Stab wounds―jesus, Eve, what’s―”

“And maybe get me a lawyer?”

Eve does not go away for attempted murder. There are bullets embedded in the walls, desperate efforts to deter a killer scattered across the floor. An obsessed psychopath and the agent who’d been chasing her.

Eve is lucky she got away at all, let alone without a scratch. The lawyer Elena called gets her off, no questions asked. Self-defense. There really are no other possibilities.

It’s … disappointing.

She’s back on the streets of Paris in a matter of hours. Eve could paint a pretty picture with all her words and her thoughts and the blood on her hands, but it won’t make the incident of this afternoon any more real.

The moon is out, the world dark. That’s the first time Eve sees her.

At first, the moments are few and far between, like at the airport – occasional strangers who will catch her eye. Eve will cross a street that’s out of her way, enter random stores just to be sure, just to be absolutely _sure_.

A month passes, two months, with no new assassinations and no new leads; the hospital monitoring doesn’t pan out, which makes Eve think The Twelve reach even further than they thought. The moments turn into minutes turn into days.

Eve sees her everywhere, now, does double takes at every pedestrian crossing.

Her heart leaps into her mouth at even the suggestion of blonde hair. Her hands shake with every flash of a ring in the sun. Eve flinches at the scent of her own perfume.

She only grows more irritated, more irrational with every disappointment. Surely there should have been some sign by now, surely a body is just waiting to turn up god knows where with Eve’s name all over it, _surely Eve’s earned at least that much from her?_

Eve should not be _angry_ at Oksana for failing to present a dead body to her in some psychotic offering, for failing to reach out to the person who almost killed her―and Eve will accept that, now – that she’s failed to kill Oksana, but that it means she’s alive somewhere―but she manages it all the same, feels entitled to _something_.

It’s an exercise in futility. Eve has only known Oksana to be in England for her job, once at that hospital in London and the other time in Bletcham.

_And once to see you_ , a voice in the back of her head adds quietly.

It’s more likely that Oksana is convalescing somewhere in the east, perhaps France; Paris if she isn’t hiding, in the countryside if she is. Somewhere nice. It comforts Eve some, to think of Oksana healing in relative luxury. She probably wouldn’t want to leave the country, attached as she is to Paris.

But then, that had been Anna. It was Anna who’d always wanted to live in Paris, Anna for whom France had ever held any real significance. Eve only knows that Oksana had been eager to leave her unsatisfying life in Russia behind. Perhaps Oksana is done with France altogether, now that she’s done with Anna. For a nonsensical moment, Eve tries to think of where she has always dreamed of living, where she wants to build a life.

It’s presumptuous. Oksana would have no way of knowing at any rate.

Eve’s traitorous heart jumps all the same.

 

 

Grocery shopping used to be something Niko did. Big shops on Saturday mornings while Eve slept in. She thinks Niko told her once that the frozen produce gets restocked the day before. Maybe it was the veal, or something equally boring.

It wasn’t something she had to worry about before. Not when she had a boring husband to take care of everything for her.

It’s a Friday. Eve is working from home today, because they’ve gone another week without any solid leads, and she’s tired of Kenny’s and Elena’s expectant looks, and she’s tired of eating the fucked-up eggs Niko keeps collecting when she's not there. She isn’t wearing a bra under her winter coat, but she didn’t bunch her hair up before leaving the house, either. It’s a concession she’ll make.

Eve isn’t looking around when she walks up and down the lanes in the local grocery by their home, dropping packages of dry pasta and frozen peas into her trolley. It’s so mundane: it's a regular Friday, and she’s not wearing a bra, and they’ve gone months without any leads, and it’s fucking Tesco. She doesn’t look around.

So it’s a shock, after so many weeks of expecting her to just show up down the street or in a café, when Eve looks up and catches sight of Oksana across the floor, standing by the apples.

Eve doesn’t move for a full ten seconds, doesn’t blink in case her eyes are playing another trick on her. But they’re not and that’s her, that’s _her_.

She feels a little like she’s having a heart attack. Eve's insides freeze up; there’s a block of ice expanding outward in her chest, and her skin shivers hotly. She breaks into a cold sweat, knees beginning to buckle underneath her. Pitching a little on the spot, she grips tightly to the handlebar on her trolley in an attempt to steady herself, knuckles white, the ring on her left hand digging into her finger.

Oksana doesn’t move either. She’s a statue, waiting and waiting, as if she knows even the slightest movement will shatter Eve’s fragile certainty. Finally, just as Eve builds up the courage to take a step toward her, Oksana smiles and sends her a friendly wave. With the same hand, she pulls an apple from a pyramid display some poor customer assistant probably slaved over, sending apples tumbling in every direction, and ducks behind a shelf.

By the time the commotion settles and Eve has navigated her way across a minefield of apples, Oksana has disappeared.

 

 

When Eve eventually returns home empty-handed―after a long panic attack bent over behind _fucking Tesco_ , during which Eve’s only thought had been an exhilarated _finally, finally_ ―Oksana is already in her kitchen stirring a pot at the stove. She’s eating the apple that she took, has even smothered it in the honey Niko keeps by the sink for his bakes.

Eve scrambles for the phone in her pocket, but when it’s in her hand, unlocked―still 1-2-3-4―and open to the dialing keypad, she stops. Oksana watches her, casual in a comfortable shirt and with her hair tied back and, oh. Eve had forgotten how rich the colour is. Honey, she'd said. Eve’s eyes drop again to the apple in her hand. They stare at each other, Oksana continuing to stir the pot.

In some ways, Eve feels as though she’s been waiting her entire life for this moment to end.

She puts her phone down.

Walking farther into the kitchen, she dumps her handbag onto the nearest counter, hangs up her coat. Eve slumps into a seat at the dining table, at the end closest to the stove, to Oksana.

She wants to say _I’m going to kill you_ , but only manages a feebly accusatory “you shouldn’t be up.”

Oksana sets the table, portions out the food, and sits in the other chair. Smiles, like she understands Eve’s meaning.

“Don’t worry,” Oksana says, conspiratorial, playful, “it was only your first. You will get better.”


	2. de manière à obtenir un creux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (so as to form a hollow)

Eve had never cared much for the church and its sacraments growing up.

Sundays were itchy dresses and the cramped little building her father would take her to for Holy Communion as a child. Hot and stuffy―especially in the summer with no air conditioning―it could hardly contain all of the Koreans in their tiny Connecticut town, gathered faithfully every weekend. Eve remembers the impassioned sermons that filled out the cracks in the walls, the hot, rhythmic heaving of a community around her. She remembers the routine, dry crackle of the host on her tongue, the bitter, crimson curl of the lip of the silver common cup.

After Connecticut and the death of her father, Eve stopped going to church altogether, and she never really took to the beautiful old cathedrals and church houses throughout Europe that she and Niko would visit over the years. Eve had never understood what called for such extravagance – that sort of veneration, the fervent worship of her childhood. The utter _devotion_.

Oksana, in all of her perfections and eccentricities―the proud line of her jaw, the delicate sweep of her hair―practically _begs_ for the opulence of a grand setting – for something holy.

It seems to Eve that she should look up now and find the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel sloping above them, be able to pick out God creating Eve beneath the more famous image of _The Creation of Adam_. She should look over Oksana’s shoulder and be able to trace where the light spills red and purple and gold over the lead came that shapes the stained glass windows in the Sainte-Chapelle. Eve should look now, and she should find her kitchen transformed―consecrated by Oksana’s presence alone―as though the universe has completely rearranged itself to fit improbably and magnificently around this one person.

She should, if Eve could look away at all.

They’re the only two people in the entire world, shrunk down to this room, to the person sitting across from Eve, the grain of the dining table against the grooves in her fingerprints, and every single inch separating them. Oksana has carved a hole into this stitch in time and Eve has tripped right into it. Pulled by Oksana’s gravity. Pushed by the dissatisfaction Eve has with her own life. And the circling, the _constant_ circling.

Nothing ever fucking happens. She’s tired. And Oksana is here.

When Eve thinks of Oksana, she mostly thinks of the before, of the way she had been. Cranberry-red macarons and marble trimmed with gold, Oksana standing two heartbeats away in Café Radozhny with her mangled face, the fruitcake bruises mottling her pale skin. Oksana gilded in filtered sunlight, reclining on the other side of the bed with blood painting her mouth. Oksana underneath Eve, drowning in her shadow, with a shiny knife in her stomach and no heartbeats at all―

The Oksana sitting across from Eve has healed. There are no visible scars on her face, no bloody tears in her skin. Eve hasn’t noticed any difficulties in movement or pained grimaces. Perfectly preserved – she’s beautiful.

How long does it take for a stab wound of that extent to heal? It’s as if Eve never even touched her: she looks just as she had the first time Eve ever laid eyes on her, pristine and unmarred all those months ago in that cramped hospital bathroom. They might not have met at all.

Her face would have gotten better first, Eve reasons, eyes tracing the graceful arc of her neck. Oksana had probably walked around wearing it like a mask every day, a facade, and, all the while, the hole Eve made in her stomach threatened to reopen with every step she took, hurting, haunting; hating.

Human, underneath it all. Destructible, in the end. A strange mixture of vindictive cheer and repulsion bubbles up in Eve at the thought.

Oksana stares back at her, silent through Eve’s inspection, patient and unbothered, only looking down from time to time to spoon a bite of food into her mouth. Beef stew; neutral, easy to eat. No knives. Eve wonders for whose benefit that is. Oksana could probably kill her in a thousand different ways, even without a weapon. Strangulation. A sharp punch to her chest. Temple to table.

“I hope you like it.” Oksana gestures to Eve’s dish and smiles. Maybe she just wants the simple pleasure of dinner with another person.

“Where have you been?”

Oksana raises her eyebrows, waves her hand in the general direction of her stomach. Eve winces.

“No, I know. I mean where have you _been_?”

This time, Oksana shrugs. Says, “Here and there.”

“Why didn’t you ever ...”

Oksana guesses at her unspoken question. She pouts. “I have a job, Eve. Same as you.”

It’s not said in a threatening tone, but Eve feels it like a blow anyway. She shifts uncomfortably in her chair. Oksana watches her with interest, eyes tracking her hands; Eve stops. “Won’t you tell me where you are, then,” she says, “so that I can come visit you sometime?”

Oksana’s eyes shine in the last vestiges of burnished sunlight streaming in through the windows and her lips split in a teasing grin. She tilts her head to one side, so that the light graces her collarbone. “Come on,” she says, friendly, knowing. Oksana smiles at Eve a moment longer, then returns to her dinner.

“I heard about Anna.”

“Mm, yes, I was there,” Oksana says without looking up, apparently bored. “Very sad.” She makes an exaggerated frowning face at her bowl for Eve’s benefit. A smudge of crème fraîche finds its way onto the corner of her mouth and she licks it away. Eve does little to hide that she’s watching.

“You aren’t? Sad?”

Oksana makes a face, shrugs again. “No.”

“Then why were you―” Eve makes a frustrated noise, tired of how unavailable Oksana is, how perfectly open she is only with her interest in Eve, when that’s only a small portion of what Eve herself is interested in. She wants to _know_ Oksana, to own her completely, even if only in this way. “Why was Anna so―why was she such a sore spot for you?”

“It was not a very good job, was it?”

Eve pauses at her quick answer. Her chair creaks when she leans forward. “What wasn’t?”

“Her husband,” Oksana answers matter-of-factly. “I did not understand her correctly. I wanted to please her, but Anna was upset, and then I was caught and sent to prison.” Oksana props her chin up in her palm, grimaces. “I did not do a very good job.”

“You were ... embarrassed,” Eve realizes slowly. “You didn’t want to see Anna because you were embarrassed.”

Oksana looks at her, chin perched in her hand, index finger tapping once against her cheek before stilling, her spoon glinting softly in her hand. Her face is unreadable. She’s close; they’re sitting at adjacent sides of the dining table, like they were the last time Oksana was here, but there are no papers separating them this time, no ghosts, no reservations.

“Why else would I not want to see her?” Oksana asks, like she’s genuinely curious.

Jesus. Eve should have poured herself a drink.

“Why are you here?”

Oksana blinks. She glances at Eve’s plate―mostly untouched―and gets out of her seat, pushing her chair in. Then, she goes to the sink to rinse her dishes before placing them in the dishwasher.

This, Eve remembers, is not a place of prayer.

Her shoes scuff almost soundlessly against the hardwood floor when Oksana turns back to face her. Almost. Eve wonders if that’s an allowance, too. “You know.”

Eve doesn’t turn around to look at her. The hairs stand up at the back of her neck, like they’re reaching toward Oksana and warding her off all at once. She suddenly wishes she were wearing that bra after all. “What are we doing?”

Oksana hums from behind her. There’s a clicking sound. A nail tapping against the kitchen worktop, perhaps. A knife on the wooden chopping board. The safety on a gun.

“I’m supposed to turn you in.”

“But you won’t.”

Eve wants her. To destroy her, to totally and unreservedly devastate her. “No, I won’t.”

“Because you like me too much,” Oksana points out, a smile in her voice – like it’s a secret inside joke. _Do you remember that time you almost erased me from existence? How crazy._

“Yes,” Eve admits, her heart thrumming in her chest.

“And you are very, very tired.” Oksana’s voice is closer now, lower, words whispering over the shell of Eve’s ear. If she leant back now, Eve would fall into her – into Oksana. Drown in her scent―she’d smell something like the perfume, Eve thinks―her head cradled in the curve of Oksana’s stomach.

Eve would find herself eye-to-eye with the hole she made in it.

“Yes.” The circling, the constant, fucking circling. Eve feels her like a pair of phantom hands slipping between her ribs and lifting up her lungs.

There’s a silence, and then a delirious moment where Eve thinks she wishes Oksana had trailed a finger across her shoulders and down her spine more than she actually thinks it happened. A beat later, Oksana is walking past Eve, still sitting motionless at the dining table.

The bubble enveloping them―shutting out Eve’s reality and insulating the two of them from the rest of the world―crumbles, and this thing between them, breathing, alive, disperses. It fills the kitchen and the drawers and itches at the spaces under her palms, laps up against her skin and claws the air from Eve’s throat.

Oksana stops in the arch before the hallway and looks back. Her mouth moves in the approximation of a smile, like she’s laughing at a joke, only this time it’s just for her.

“Пока пока.”

 

 

“Good weekend?”

Eve hums. “Hm?” She looks up. “Sorry, what?”

“I asked if you―good weekend?” Kenny repeats. “Just because you―you look like you―well.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Uhm, you look―with another person―”

“You look as though you just got laid,” Elena says, taking pity on him. “Something good happen over the weekend?”

Eve nearly falls backward out of her seat. “What? No,” she blusters. Stupidly, Eve thinks of the bottle of perfume under her bed. She picks her thermos up for something to do, puts it to her mouth, then puts it back down when she realizes it’s empty. Eve clears her throat. “No,” she repeats.

“Okay,” Elena drawls, spinning in her chair and walking over, kindly electing to ignore Eve’s moment of weirdness. “Well, _we’ve_ got something good for you.” She grins, rocking on the balls of her feet and pausing for effect.

Eve laughs. “What?” She looks over at Kenny for a hint. “What is it?”

Grinning, Elena whips a folder out from behind her back and says, “Tada! There’s been a new assassination!”

The smile on Eve’s face freezes in place. Her brain stops functioning for a beat. “Oh. Uh―wow.”

“Aren’t you psyched? You’ve been so down lately since the investigation slowed down, and with the whole did-I-murder-Villanelle thing.” This last part Elena mutters out of the corner of her mouth. “We thought this might cheer you up.” Kenny nods.

“No, no, I’m excited! As excited as a dead body can make a person,” Eve reassures them. “Uhm.” She hesitates, urging her brain to start working again. The block of ice in her chest makes a reappearance. “Did―was it someone in England or―or the UK or something?”

“Mm ...” Elena hums, looking down to flip through the file in her hands. Eve holds her breath. “No. Some politician in Antwerp with ties to the local diamond trade. He was killed while attending a private gala.” She looks up. “Why? Do you know something?”

The relief, the validation – it knocks the air swiftly from Eve’s lungs. But the ice does not go fast. It twists and shrivels her insides, and the meltwater snaking through her veins sends shivers down her arms and legs.

Eve shakes it off. “No,” she says, “it’s nothing.”

 

 

London experiences a cold spell in the new year.

Christmas is a quiet affair: Eve spends it alone at home, only leaving the house to pick up Chinese take-away for dinner from one of the few places still open. As an afterthought, she makes a stop at the local Korean supermarket to get a plastic tub of _tteokguk_. Niko is nowhere to be seen.

There’s no trace of Oksana, no suggestion of an intrusion in the house, but the present is sitting on her dining table when Eve gets back in, done up in festive wrappings and a bow. She practises some semblance of resistance, of control, eyeing the package as she moves around the kitchen collecting dishes for one, and only allows herself to open it when her food is unpacked and steaming in front of her.

Then, she pours herself a glass of 2012 Cask 23, and wonders vaguely whether Oksana is watching her.

After she finishes eating, Eve refills her glass and brings it into the living room. The Antwerp case file lies loose and spread across the coffee table where she’d been poring over it earlier in the day. Their victim died bleeding out from a minuscule puncture in his leg, right in the middle of a crowd of gala attendees. Same way Victor Kedrin had. Almost as though they were meant to connect it to the string of murders earlier in the year that had only stopped briefly when Eve put Oksana out of commission.

That open flaunting, that arrogance, has Oksana written all over it, but Eve would have made the connection on the basis of Oksana’s visit alone. It niggles at the back of her mind. This feels bigger than their game. Besides, Oksana can only be as arrogant as The Twelve will allow her to be.

What is their endgame? Why would The Twelve _want_ to be seen?

The skin on the inside of Eve’s thigh aches faintly where she’s gripping it. She stares down at her hand for five giddy seconds, before letting go. Eve puts her glass down and reclines on the sofa, throwing an arm over her eyes with a frustrated groan. She’s so fucking _easy_.

In the wine-warm dregs of the night, Eve’s brain conjures up the knife’s-edge caress of Oksana’s words, the warm press of her face under Eve’s jaw. There’s the slow, curious tilt of Oksana’s head and the pleased― _self-satisfied_ ―smile she wore when she caught the scent of Eve’s perfume.

Her thighs ache again – it’s a sweet agony, a delicious torment. Eve isn’t entirely in control of her own hand when it slips under the hem of her sweater, when the heel slots into the curve of her hip. She drags the pads of her fingers, once, twice across her skin. Then, slowly, tenderly, she digs her fingers into the soft flesh of her stomach.

In the morning, back sore and unhappy from her night on the sofa, Eve watches the rest of the wine bleed velvet down her kitchen sink.

 

 

A month passes before Eve sees her again.

She’s sitting at a café near the office, at a patio table despite the cold. The raucous shouts and laughter of a corporate lunch party filter outside, hazy and incoherent in the sharp winter air.

Eve is looking out onto the city streets one minute, watching passersby and cars streak past, when she turns back to take a sip of her coffee and Oksana is sitting across from her the next. She’s a splash of bright red and blue against London’s grey, a lightning strike down the centre of the city’s daily monotony.

So. Oksana definitely knows where they work.

“Hello, Eve.”

“Uh, hi.” After a moment of staring, her cup suspended in midair before her mouth, Eve moves, peering at Oksana over the rim of her cup. “Oh,” she says. “Coffee? Do you ... drink coffee?”

As if on cue, Eve’s waiter appears at their side, setting a cup and saucer in front of Oksana, casting furtive glances at Oksana all the while. She only looks up briefly to thank him, otherwise keeping her eyes on Eve. His face flushes, and he leaves. Eve scoffs, just a little.

Oksana’s eyes gleam when she talks, when she smiles. She isn’t quick to laugh, whereas Eve is prone to busting out in laughter, especially when she’s feeling awkward, which she definitely is at this very moment. It’s surreal, that Oksana is sitting across the table from her now, having afternoon coffee, which she does, in fact, drink―with cream and a spoon of sugar―and making small talk about the holidays, when the last time they were together Eve is _pretty_ sure they were talking about having sex. And also, Oksana _murders_ people.

Their waiter comes back, topping up Eve’s coffee. He asks whether Oksana would like anything else off the menu. She laughs pleasantly, says, “I’m stuffed, but thank you,” her face ethereal when the misted echoes of her mirth frame it.

It seems incongruous, somehow. Like the air is stealing the breath from Oksana’s lungs every time it puffs white in front of her mouth. Eve wants to reach out and take it in her fists, crush the life out of it.

Every sound she makes, every breath Oksana takes, belongs to Eve, has belonged to Eve since the day she spared her life. She’s only here now because Eve is allowing it.

Eve shivers, and the thought, sudden as it arrived, passes. The cloud of Oksana’s laughter dissipates.

“Did you like it?” Oksana asks after the waiter leaves. She leans in over the table, bringing with her all her heady gravity, her sweet warmth, hands folded neatly under her chin.

For a moment, Eve thinks she’s referring to the wine. Her chest flushes hotly with the memory of it, of her hands moving down her body, the clawing of nails into skin. Some of this must show on Eve’s face because Oksana’s eyes light up in delight, her teeth peaking brightly from between her lips. Her shoulders bunch up around her neck as she ducks and moves closer to Eve, on the very edge of her seat.

“It was―I―” Eve stops, surveying Oksana’s reaction and the rapturous look on her face. She isn’t talking about Christmas.

Eve falls back against her seat. “That was you?”

The grin transfigures Oksana’s face, crinkling the skin around her eyes, elevating her. It’s answer enough.

As far as murders go, the one at the top of their ‘probably-not-relevant’ pile is tame. There’s little about it that is suggestive of Oksana; it has none of her signature flair, which is why she and Elena deemed it irrelevant. Eve studies Oksana’s expression, the eagerness in it. They need to open that case up again.

Oksana, so attentive, doesn’t notice the change in Eve’s mood. Her eyes, truffle-coloured in the cold light, flicker around Eve’s face, catching on the warmth Eve can feel still lingering in her cheeks. “Why are you telling me this?” Eve asks.

Oksana’s eyes narrow briefly, before her face arranges itself into a smile. “Because you want me to. You told me so.” She presses her fist to her mouth, smearing the smile on it, until it looks almost ghastly from where Eve sits. “Because I want to know.”

Nervous, champagne titters fill Eve’s chest and bubble up her throat, but she suppresses them, swallowing hard. “Want to know what?”

Oksana grins at her, her teeth catching on her blushing knuckles. She looks away, bringing her cup to her lips.

Eve watches her smile at someone over her shoulder, cheeks cresting, eyes squinting. She says, “And it’s you telling me this?”

Oksana’s gaze flits over to Eve, lightning-fast, then back again. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, your bosses didn’t make you do this? Konstantin, or Carolyn?”

A muscle jumps near Oksana’s temple. “I told you because I wanted to,” she says flatly.

It’s Eve’s turn to smile. The gears in her brain churn and she sits up. “They did. The Twelve – they want this to happen. They _want_ us to know. And you ...” Eve says, trailing off and pausing thoughtfully, “... you don’t know why.”

Oksana stands abruptly, her chair scraping across the ground, metal against cement. Eve jumps, her knee knocking into the table and causing their cups to clash awfully against their saucers.

The look Oksana shoots Eve is positively _venomous_ ; it stuns her. The skittish energy that had been flooding Eve’s bloodstream screeches to a halt and her heart jumps into her mouth, loud and insistent between her ears. Their strip of sidewalk is deserted: no one else will brave the weather to eat outside and their waiter is gone, attending to the patrons having lunch inside.

For a long time, Oksana does nothing but stare at Eve, looming over the table, her hands gripping either side of it, fury spoiling her delicate features. Eve doesn’t move. Sweat gathers at the small of her back and where her scarf twists, stifling around her neck. A lock of Eve’s hair falls into her face, but neither of them move to fix it.

Oksana’s eyes follow it. It’s slow, the process by which her face relaxes, muscles unlocking one at a time, turning fond as she tracks a bead of sweat on Eve’s brow. She takes her sweet time watching it vanish into Eve’s hair. “Hm,” she huffs, smiling languidly.

Without a word, Oksana straightens, turns on her heel, and leaves, disappearing around the nearest bend, the tail of her coat whipping out of sight.

 

 

Oksana seems to realize Eve won’t wear the clothes she buys for her, the scarves or belts, the perfume, but she’ll drink the wine.

The gifts don’t come with much frequency. In fact, they come just infrequently enough that Eve will accept them, which she suspects is the idea.

Eve doesn’t drink Rieslings, so they stop appearing in her home. She won’t keep the bottles, even if they aren’t finished, so they start coming exclusively in half- or standard sizes.

They don’t talk about their jobs much when Oksana drops by – and she drops by rather a lot, now: at Eve’s house, at the store, on the way home from work on beautiful days when Eve has decided to walk. Eve tried, in the beginning, but to little avail. Oksana’s face twitches whenever she asks, like it had outside the café; Eve isn’t sure Oksana knows any more about The Twelve than she did before, and she isn’t certain she wants to find out just how dangerous Oksana’s irritation with not knowing is.

(Would she kill for something like that? She’s almost certainly killed for less.)

Instead, Oksana takes Eve’s walks with her, joins her at pavement cafés and asks after her week while scowling at the people smoking nearby. When the weather drives them inside, they eat lunch together in the house Eve once shared with her husband. Sometimes, they even watch movies.

Oksana pays her attention, pays attention _to_ her. Anna had mentioned something about how Oksana weaseled her way into people’s hearts, how needy and persuasive she could be. She described it like it was an undertaking, a burden that only she would bear – though, Anna had been only too willing to assume that role in Oksana’s life.

With Eve, it’s like the opposite. Oksana makes her feel ... _known_ , like Eve didn’t used to exist, like she wasn’t _here_ , not before she met Oksana, before Oksana looked at her like this, before Oksana’s hand met hers.

It’s fucked up. It’s fucking _textbook_.

She finds herself thinking Oksana is not like other psychopaths far too often, anyway.

Eve remembers the first time Oksana ambushed her in her home, remembers the warm, golden light blanketing them and the drops of water snaking down her neck, the secrets that hid in the curl of Oksana’s smile. She could have suffocated on the overwhelming fear and anticipation, choked on the inky shadows invading her lungs. Even that night Oksana sat eating beef stew at her dining table, Eve had been on edge. Some of that paranoia lingers even now, but, in the light of day, Oksana is not so menacing. She’s just ... exceptional.

“You know,” Oksana offers without prompting, her back exposed to Eve. They’re at the supermarket; Oksana cuts a striking figure walking down the cereal aisle on a weekend shop in a designer coat. Eve trails after her with her trolley. “Before shooting herself, Anna tried to kill me.” Oksana turns to look at her, shoulder blades twisting under creamy white fabric as she continues walking, her eyes dancing back and forth between Eve’s, watching her process this information.

 _Did you love her?_ “But she couldn’t do it.”

“No.” Oksana defies reality, eclipses the rest of the world in Eve’s mind. It’s frightening. “You did, though.”

 

 

Up, and two inches to the left.

Eve could.

 

 

The killings get progressively showier:

There’s an induced heart attack at an upscale strip club in Italy, the details of which had made Kenny blush; poison by White Russian – Oksana had been especially pleased with herself for this during one of her visits; a drowning and then an immolation, which Eve thinks may have been pointed hints that Oksana found out about Eve’s trip with Elena to Russia, somehow.

Once, just once, a fatal stab wound to the stomach.

(Dominique Beaulieu. She had been a board member for several organizations around Europe and made frequent charitable contributions. Oksana had arranged her body in her bed―just as she’d done with Frank―had posed Dominique’s hands so that they’d haloed the knife, sticking upright like a cross, or a tombstone, out of her stomach where Oksana had left it.

It had been slow, then.)

Eve hasn’t told Elena and Kenny much about her time in Paris beyond that call she made the afternoon of her run-in with Oksana, but she suspects they looked into it, given the delicate way Elena had broken the news of their latest victim to the office, alongside the careful looks they’d kept shooting her.

Oksana had done very little talking during her next visit, content to watch what Eve would do. She left when Eve couldn’t stop trembling. There’d been no excuse of cold water, this time.

And now that she’s back, the killings occur with the same sort of regularity they had before. Oksana visits, Oksana leaves. Someone dies. Oksana gloats, just a little, when she visits again, and the cycle goes on, except Eve is a part of it now, too. And Oksana is right: Eve _did_ say she wanted to know, told Oksana so of her own volition, irrespective of The Twelve’s machinations.

Their routine reminds her a little of the letters Oksana had written so many years ago, although there’s no real resemblance between the dead people Elena puts on Eve’s desk and the lovesick notes rendered in fledgling French that Anna would receive.

(No resemblance except, perhaps, the meticulous portfolio Eve still keeps at the office, and to which she adds every one of Oksana’s new kills.)

Eve has Elena and Kenny focusing on trying to find a pattern among the assassinations rather than trying to find her, but Oksana is still their only point of contact with The Twelve. And Eve has her. Eve has her, and she _doesn’t know what she’s doing_.

“One thing’s for sure – we’re nowhere near close to figuring this whole thing out.”

“What makes you say that?” Eve asks.

“Well,” Elena says, “there’s no way they don’t know about what we’re doing here. They would have offed us by now, wouldn’t they?”

 

 

What kinds of movies does a psychopath like to watch? What kinds of movies does a psychopath _not_ like to watch?

Lights off, tucked into her corner of the couch, television flashing, Eve can almost pretend this is just any other night in, even with Oksana just inches from her, sitting at the opposite end, in Niko’s spot. Eve laughs at all the wrong parts, jumps at all the right ones; she remembers how Niko used to hate that.

Beside her, Oksana focuses on the screen and her in equal parts. During the second half, she laughs once or twice.

Oksana watches movies a little like she watches Eve: like she wants to learn, and every moment is an opportunity, an unfamiliar thing to sink her teeth into, chew over, and spit out if necessary. Vivisection, Eve’s brain supplies. They’d had a case study about that once, in college.

Eve is in a sour mood today. Kenny had gotten a hit off of one of Carolyn’s devices that had ultimately led to nothing; Eve’s pretty sure they’re never going to see her again. It’s that resentment, compounded with her irritation at the space separating them, that makes her snipe, “What?” when she catches Oksana frowning thoughtfully at the television. “Admiring your contemporaries?”

Oksana doesn’t understand the joke, or she chooses to take it seriously, turning to look at Eve, aghast. “You think I am like that?” she asks, pointing at the television. Just then, the knife-wielding killer on screen cackles, as if to prove her point.

“Yes!” Unbidden, Eve recalls the elegant hairpin, the pools of blood that spouted from puncture wounds the size of peas in the legs of two different men. Oksana is so good at her job, so perfect, Eve almost _regrets_ comparing her to the brutish murderers among Niko’s film collection.

“No.” Oksana shakes her head, turning back to continue watching the movie and shaking Eve out of her silent recount of her many assassinations. “I do not think I would make a very good killer. Not,” she continues before Eve can interrupt, “like _that_.”

“Then why do _you_ do it?”

Oksana looks at her from the corner of her eye. “Does it matter?” she asks.

For a moment, Eve doesn’t speak. “I―of course it does.”

“But it won’t change anything,” Oksana says. Her mouth splits into a grin when Eve doesn’t immediately contradict her. “For the money,” she finally answers, shrugging. “Because it is exciting. Because I am _very_ good at it.”

Eve doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t look when Oksana leans over to place her mouth by Eve’s ear, when she murmurs, “ _Because I get off on it._ ”

Neither of them move or speak, and even their breathing doesn’t break the silence that follows her words, until Oksana gives in to a short laugh, pulling away. Her breath displaces the wispy hairs by Eve’s temple and makes the skin there tingle. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Eve isn’t sure, actually, but she doesn’t say that.

 

 

The murders keep coming, week after week, and they get no closer to figuring out what connects them all.

Sometimes, when Eve emphasizes cases which otherwise seem innocuous, Elena will give her a long, searching look, like she _knows_. It stops the motion of Eve’s heart in her chest, which doesn’t start up again until Elena looks away. And still, she can’t bring herself to utter a single word about it all.

Eve supposes Oksana hasn’t gotten what she wants from Eve yet, or else why would she keep coming back?

“You are not very good at cooking,” Oksana says. “Is that why you liked your husband?”

“I liked my husband,” Eve begins, and Oksana smiles, slow and gratified. “I _liked_ him,” she continues firmly, “because he was nice to me.” Eve stares a gleeful Oksana down, daring her to say something.

Oksana raises an eyebrow, a smile still curving her mouth. It drops a little when she puts another bite of the rubbery eggs Eve made in her mouth. She sets her fork down, politely bracing her pinkie against the table to mute the sound.

“What?” Eve says. _What are you thinking?_ “Can’t cut that off, can you?”

Oksana’s face doesn’t close off anymore at the mention of Anna or her husband, of her great embarrassment. In fact, her smile grows a little wider; she looks mildly impressed, eyes sweeping over Eve, up and down and up again.

Every time she looks at her, it’s like Oksana is seeing Eve for the first time. Eve wonders when the novelty will fade, when Oksana will exhaust her capacity to be surprised by her. When Oksana will learn everything there is to know about Eve and grow bored of her.

“No,” Oksana says, slowly, brightly, “but you have already done that for me, I think.”

They haven’t had sex yet. They haven’t even kissed, and Oksana seems to still remember the revulsion, the loathing of that day they sat eating Niko’s shepherd’s pie at this very table and Oksana presumed to hold Eve’s hand; she hasn’t tried it again.

Villanelle was bold, arrogant and unafraid to take risks in her kills. The Oksana of the hospital bathroom, of that afternoon in her flat in Paris, was forward. This Oksana is reserved. She watches, and she waits – for what, Eve’s not sure.

She doesn’t think they’ve touched since Oksana’s fingertips skimmed Eve’s cheek and slipped through her hair, since the only thing separating Eve’s hands and the hole in Oksana’s stomach was the blood spilling from it. The only times they ever really seem to touch these days are when one of them has a knife held to the other.

There’s a clink by Eve’s hand and she flinches, recoiling. Oksana doesn’t notice, doesn’t say anything, at least, as she continues clearing the dishes, gathering Eve’s knife and fork in one hand and humming something classical Eve only vaguely recognizes. She takes their dishes to the sink and washes up. It was during her last visit, when Eve made an offhanded comment that she uses the dishwasher only as a glorified drying rack.

Oksana does all the dishes, even the ones Eve left in the sink from dinner the night before. Then, she exits with a thank-you-for-the-food and an earnest smile, leaving nothing behind but the uncertainty that she’ll be back.

Every moment, every second of the day, Eve longs to touch Oksana. She thinks of nothing more or less than the silky-smooth gloss of her hair, the give of skin and fat and muscle under her fingertips. She thinks of Oksana, of whether or not she feels it, too: the absolute need to rake her nails across Eve’s flesh and bones. She wants so much to touch Oksana, for _Oksana_ to want to touch her.

If this morning has been another game―they all seem to be―then Eve suspects Oksana has won. _Breakfast with Eve_ , Eve thinks, _wash the dishes_. Check.

She wonders whether Oksana still thinks about her when she’s not there.

 

 

The end of spring arrives before Eve finally asks the question that’s been on her mind since Oksana was first resurrected in the produce section of one of London’s shittiest Tescos.

The sun beats down on her black hair, suffusing it with feverish warmth, but Eve doesn’t tie it up, not even when the heat trembling across her body becomes uncomfortable. The iced coffee Oksana bought her sweats in her hand, a small comfort. Oksana seems not to mind the weather, her skin gleaming attractively with the fine sheen of sweat covering it. Her hands are stuffed casually into her pockets, and she’s humming again, softly under her breath.

They’re taking a stroll just off the beaten pavement of central London. Oksana has proven to be very good at finding places like this, odd parts of the city Eve isn’t familiar with even after having lived in it for so many years.

It’s nice, peaceful. It seems almost a shame, to shatter the tranquility of the moment.

It’s probably why Eve does it.

“Aren’t you angry?” she asks at last. “Don’t you ever want to kill me for what I did to you?”

Oksana glances sideways at her. Something flashes across her face, too fast for Eve to see, and then the corners of her mouth quirk. For a moment, Eve thinks she might say something glib, as she’s prone to doing when Eve asks her a question, but Oksana asks, seriously, “Would you like it if I did?”

 _I’d like it if you touched me_ , Eve thinks, _I’d like it if I never saw you again. I’d like it if you told me why the hell you want to know._

Oksana takes her down a narrow side street. It’s quieter here, an old district that has little to do with the hustle and bustle of the London Eve is accustomed to. If she were to have Kenny map their path today, Eve wonders whether he’d come back to her with a connect-the-dots of CCTV blind spots; she wonders whether he’d come back to her with a video of Oksana walking proudly, in plain view of every single camera along their route.

Although Eve’s certain it was a genuine question, Oksana, ever so accommodating, doesn’t seem all that bothered by Eve’s lack of response, and she doesn’t offer any real answer to Eve’s own questions. She coos at a dog they pass in the street, asks its owner in excited, posh English what breed it is, and oh, where did she get it, and how long has she had it now? They walk further down the street and away from the sounds of the city. In a residential area, they pass a dog chained behind a fence. Oksana doesn’t acknowledge it at all, even when it barks at her.

So much of the time, Eve feels as though she’s being tested, that _Oksana_ is testing her, but Eve doesn’t know what she’s being tested on, and she has absolutely no idea how well she’s doing.

It’s silent but for the drag of Eve’s shoes and the click of Oksana’s heels against the pavement. Eve has to take almost two steps for every one that Oksana does – not a game of catch-up, but constant work.

A car parked by the curb catches Eve’s eye; spider-webbed cracks snake outward from a single imperfection in the windshield.

Anything can break.

It’s part her frustration at Oksana, part absent-mindedness that has Eve’s next words falling from her mouth: “Sometimes, I’m afraid of what I might do.”

Oksana smiles at her, actually stops in her tracks, eyes wide and bright in the light. She leans in, so close―not touching, never touching―that Eve can smell her perfume, something expensive and luxurious and alien, distinctly separate from the sultry notes of _La Villanelle_. She turns her head one way and then the next, as if to check if anyone’s listening, except there’s no one around, and her eyes don’t leave Eve’s, besides. Eve spots a camera over her shoulder.

“Don’t be,” Oksana whispers behind one hand.

 

 

Sometimes, Eve just wants to put Oksana on her back, beached starfish, spread-eagle, limp and helpless. She’d break her in half, pry her open rib by rib like the chocolate oranges Niko used to like so fucking much, just to get a look at what’s inside.

Eve imagines what she’ll uncover, scared that she’ll find her knife there, that she _wants_ to find it there, still buried deep in the mess of muscles and bones and shiny, blood-slick entrails. A lightning rod, a silver stake.

 _I was here. I branded her._ They’ll find it, the next woman and all the ones that will inevitably come after her, snakes for hair. They’ll trace Eve’s fingerprints, etched in silver glass in the knife’s handle, and know that she mattered. That, once, it was Eve in front of Oksana, who held her like a statue in her stone gaze.

Once, Eve dreams of finding Anna’s hair; this awful, heaving black mass of tangles. She pulls at it, wrenching thick, black ropes that cut her fingers like piano wire from in-between the vertebrae that compose Oksana’s proud spine where they’ve wound themselves. She pulls and pulls, until there’s nothing left but the bloody channel where Oksana’s lungs should be.

 

 

They receive a transcript in the post of Irina’s statement in autumn, some thirteen odd months after Oksana kidnapped her. Jerry from MI6 fought a long, hard battle to get it for them, and had an interpreter―the same one who accompanied Eve and Elena to Russia all that time ago―translate it over the weekend so that they could look at it as soon as possible.

Jerry does not win the battle for the rest of the case file: the potential leads, the photos of the crime scene. Eve thinks she’s thankful for that.

“Older women?” Elena asks, paging through the transcript.

“Curly hair,” Kenny tells her.

“Ah, curly hair. No one told me she had curly hair.”

“Wasn’t relevant at the time,” Eve mutters, shuffling through her own copy of the statement. She snorts when she gets to the part where Irina says Villanelle isn’t a pedophile. Sobers when she reads that Irina thought Villanelle was a good person, right up until she shot her father.

“‘She said that they used to be together, then she said that she didn’t love her anymore. That’s when Anna shot herself.’” Elena recites. She shudders. “Jesus. That kid is going to grow up with some fucked-up ideas about love.” Elena looks up. “I didn’t know psychopaths could even fall in love at all. I thought they were incapable of basic human emotions or something.”

“She was barely eighteen,” Kenny points out, surprisingly insightful, “and Anna was her teacher. Psychopath or not, I don’t think she could know herself, whether what they had was real.”

Eve hums distractedly, then stops reading to look up when the others don’t say anything else. Both Elena and Kenny are staring at her. “What?”

“You’re our resident expert on psychopaths,” Elena explains.

Eve looks back down at the statement, pursing her lips. She reads the section Elena had, then the part that follows, where Irina describes Oksana in the seconds after. Hardly any reaction at all. Sadness, maybe. But Irina couldn’t be sure, and what did it matter anyway? Oksana _shot_ her father.

But it does matter – at least, to Eve it does. She thinks of the letters Anna had filed away in her home, sorted by date, the fingers that had run over words and crossed t’s and haloed o’s, that had followed old creases and lovingly tucked paper back into envelope.

She thinks of the embarrassment that had prevented Oksana from going to see her again, the arrogance. Years of her life obsessing over a single woman, discarded with hardly any reaction at all. Sadness, maybe. A lasting taste for learning new languages and women with curly hair.

“I don’t think they fall in love.” Eve remembers the cozy, cluttered inside of Anna’s home from when she visited, then superimposes the blood on that image herself: she imagines it pooling cranberry-red on the floor and painting the old walls and bookshelves crimson, splattered across Oksana’s face and staining the letters she wrote, once.

 _Not like other psychopaths, not like other psychopaths._  “I think they just get bored.”

 

 

Oksana arrives one evening bearing a bottle of 1993 Dom Pérignon.

She takes two whiskey glasses out of one of the kitchen cupboards―Eve and Niko had never really had any need for champagne flutes before―and then plucks a DVD from Niko’s collection to watch before plopping down onto the couch. Eyes on the television, she carefully eases the cork from the bottle so that it doesn’t erupt. Two decades of built-up gas escape with a muffled pop, and then she fills each glass and hands one to Eve with a flourish.

“What’s this for?” Eve asks, laughing a little.

Oksana looks over at Eve, sends her a quick, satisfied smile. “It was a gift.”

Eve doesn’t say anything. She brings her glass to her lips and takes a sip. The champagne fizzes inside her mouth and steals the moisture from her tongue. Watching the television, eyes unseeing, she racks her brain, but it’s no use – they’re coming up on a month now with no new assassinations. Or so they’d thought. She’d hardly noticed.

Eve steals a glance at Oksana. She’s sitting forward in her seat―still as far from Eve as the sofa will allow―elbows on her knees, absently swilling her champagne between her fingers and engrossed in the film. Her eyes, blue in the light, dart around the screen with every cut, following each actor that appears on screen. She’s frowning again.

Eve thinks she _would_ like it if Oksana wanted to kill her. She’d like to reach across the sofa, kneel in the space separating them, and feel it like hellfire on her soul.

Instead, she says, “Don’t you want to have sex with me?”

Oksana shoots her a look. “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

“Don’t give stupid answers!” Eve counters. “Why haven’t you touched me yet?”

Inexplicably, Oksana laughs. It’s a small, sweet sound, making her cheekbones look more pronounced in the glow of the television. “Is that what you want?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“ _Really?_ ”

Eve bristles. She stands, puts her empty glass down on the coffee table, and then takes two steps forward, so that she’s standing over Oksana. Oksana looks up at her, the smile on her face gone; Eve takes a muted kind of pleasure in that.

Sun low in the sky, the last bloody shards of daylight falling red across her knuckles, Eve touches her.

She starts at the crest of Oksana’s right shoulder, letting the tip of her thumb whisper along the elegant slope of her clavicle. Slowly―luxuriating in her first feel of Oksana in _months_ ―Eve allows it to dip into the hollow it carves into her collar, goosebumps rising in her wake. Her other fingers dig into the skin and muscles that stretch between neck and shoulder, catching on golden strands of hair and _just_ tugging. It’s none too gentle, but Oksana doesn’t protest, stock-still as Eve renders the skin of her pale neck a lovely pink and the television murmurs on, casting her face in white light one moment and bruised shadows the next. Her lips part silently when Eve’s thumb presses into the notch in her throat.

In this moment, Oksana really does resemble the statue of her dreams, enraptured and unbreathing and paralyzed, tethered to the spot as if pinned by invisible, silver nails, caught in Eve’s crosshairs. Like this, Oksana is simple and not confusing and so beautiful, all sharp lines and soft curves and wide eyes in awe of Eve. All for Eve.

She wishes Oksana would stay like this forever. That she’d tear another hole in time, build righteous walls of vibrant stained glass around them; that Eve could preserve her in paint and marble and resin and gold, so that she might spend an eternity tracing every perfect inch of Oksana’s body, learning every crease and fold. But Eve is a shark: if she stops moving, stops dancing this dance with Oksana for even one minute, she’ll disintegrate. There’s no looking back now. Eve presses the tip of her tongue to her teeth to curb the phantom crackle of bread on it, the tart bite of wine.

It’s easy, letting her hand descend Oksana’s arm to remove the champagne from her limp hand and set it down beside hers on the coffee table. To take Oksana’s hand in her own and pull her, pliant, up out of the sofa and toward the staircase.

Oksana lets herself be led.

When she reaches the bottom step, Eve looks back. Oksana’s eyes trail after the television.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm also ifyouresure on Tumblr, where you may find me screaming past season two spoilers and dreading having to write this next part!


	3. enfouissez le son

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (bury the sound)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for making it this far! I had hopes to finish this much, much earlier, but I hope you enjoy regardless (while I catch up with what is now _all_ of series two, less one episode). Thank you so much for reading.

The path from the kitchen to the bedroom stretches endless.

It’s quiet, calm but for the blood racing through her veins. Eve can’t hear Oksana behind her, doesn’t hear her breathing or the silent thump of her shoes on the stairs. She doesn’t see the pictures they pass, framed photographs of Eve with her friends, Eve with Niko, Eve, Eve, _Eve_ nailed to the walls.

Sometimes, in moments like these, when all she knows is the cacophonous beat of her heart in her ears, her breath pushing desperate from her lungs, Eve thinks of life as some great cage that she’s constructed. As though everything beyond herself doesn’t exist; that the world―its people, her hands, the tendons stretching and snaking under her skin―is a symphony she’s painted onto the inside of her mind in reds and golds and simply dreamed into being. With one stray thought, Eve might smother this moment, could evaporate the champagne boiling in her stomach and the person climbing the stairs behind her, and all of this―Eve and Oksana and the music between them―would cease to exist in an instant.

It doesn’t feel real, the warm weight of Oksana’s hand in hers, palm to calloused palm. Even the delirious heat of her body―closer than it has been since the bed in her flat in Paris―seems imagined, the rose-coloured recollections of a dream Eve has had a dozen times. Eve feels her stare like an almost-touch, a make-believe caress, Oksana’s eyes the two prongs of a tuning fork, tracing Eve’s back and the curl of her hair over her shoulders, feeling for a place to strike.

Oksana doesn’t speak. She’s a shadow, the mere suggestion of a person: she moves only when Eve moves, pauses when Eve pauses, neither resisting nor encouraging Eve’s lead. It’s the least real thing about all of this.

Oksana is _alive_ , so animate and full of vibrancy, far removed from the realm of anything Eve’s mind could ever conceive. Her deference to Eve now is disconcerting – it runs counter to every portrait Eve has ever painted of Oksana: of the serial killer who murders on a whim; of Villanelle, who takes what she wants without a second thought. Again, the question licks white-hot at the corner of Eve’s thoughts, unwelcome and aggravating: _what is Oksana waiting for?_

They’re only three quarters of the way up the staircase when Eve stops.

Oksana is staring down at their hands when Eve turns to look at her. The lift of her head is unhurried, her eyes, dusky in the dim light, following an invisible line across the inside of Eve’s wrist, almost tangible gliding up the curve of her clothed shoulder. She pauses on Eve’s hair for a beat―a sustained note in their arrangement―until, finally, her eyes fall almost reverent upon Eve’s face.

Even one step above her, Eve’s eyeline hardly shores up above Oksana’s.

“Ooh,” Oksana says with a grin when Eve pulls on the hand she’s still holding while her other hand pushes flat against Oksana’s sternum. Lower back ramming into the banister, Oksana catches herself from bending too far over it with her free hand, bracing against the handrail. For a moment, Eve lets the sound of the crack of a skull colour her senses, imagines the candy-apple spill of her blood on the ground floor.

Oksana’s eyes flick down to where Eve’s hips press into her side. She cocks her head, the shadows cast by her eyelashes dusting sweetly across her cheekbones. Her eyes flash back up to Eve’s, the expression on her face almost challenging.

Eve buries the image in her head, and rises to the challenge.

It’s almost vindictive, the way she dips forward, taking advantage of the free skin Oksana has afforded her, the way her teeth sink into the space where neck and shoulder meet, harsh and uncaring of Oksana’s wince of pain; it’s almost devout, when Eve’s tongue follows immediately after.

Oksana is softer than she remembers―though Eve has only the way Oksana’s stomach muscles had tensed and spasmed in pain when she stabbed her to compare―her flesh more forgiving than she’d thought when Eve nips her way up Oksana’s throat. She smells wonderful, deep and rich like cologne where she’s sprayed her perfume, tastes bitter where it touches her skin. Eve presses an open-mouthed kiss to the graceful slope of her jaw when she reaches it, ducks to mouth at her collarbone where it protrudes at the base of her neck. Oksana’s hands clench where Eve has them spaced wide over the handrail, pinned under hers. Her cheek is warm against Eve’s when she pulls away.

Oksana’s breathing has grown heavy, her chest filling up and flattening with each inhale and exhale, straining for air, for her. It’s hopelessly lovely to Eve; she swallows hard and fire rains down in the pit of her stomach at the sight before her. Oksana’s eyes are nearly black, dazed and looking back up at Eve – much further below Eve’s eyeline now than they’d been before, with the way Oksana has slumped low against the banister.

The remainder of the path to the bedroom is hardly any distance at all.

When the door closes behind them, Eve has just enough time to flick the lamp on, to doubt herself, before Oksana meets her halfway.

It’s soft. When they pause for breath, Oksana’s eyes are still pitch, set wide and dark and fervent in her face, but the touch of her lips when she dives back in is gentle. It’s exploratory, the wash of the tide over an unfamiliar shore: simple contact at first, then taking Eve’s upper lip between hers, then a delicate brush of her tongue against Eve’s bottom lip. It’s not unlike being split open, like waves breaking, when Eve’s lips part for her.

Oksana’s mouth slants against hers, pressing into her, tongue warm and wet when it meets Eve’s. She drops Eve’s hand, still loosely held around hers, and holds Eve’s face between her hands, thumbs smoothing over Eve’s jawline and temples, surprisingly tender. The bedroom wall meets Eve’s back, knocking the breath from her lungs as Oksana drives her backward, and then her slender fingers, still chilled from the champagne they’d been drinking, slip through her hair. She combs it behind Eve’s ears, like she had in Paris, like she’s something impossible, and leans away to watch Eve’s face as she does.

In the hooded light of the lamp, Oksana’s eyes shine faintly, teeth glimmering from where they peek out from between her lips in a smile. Her stare dances between Eve’s mouth, her eyes, the places where her laugh lines fan out from the corners. It’s a fond sort of attention, not so different from the kind she pays Eve when they meet―when Oksana ambushes her―in the restaurants and cafés throughout London, but, away from the city lights and caught in the private warmth of her bedroom, from only inches away – it feels like fantasy. Eve’s head falls with a thunk against the wall behind her and she lets it loll sideways, turning away from Oksana as she drags a hand over her eyes.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” she mutters, laughing at the absurdity of Oksana’s body against hers while the suitcase with her perfume lies only five feet away, under the bed. Eve has _masturbated_ about Oksana in the bathtub just down the hall. She’s lost sleep over the knife she stuck in her stomach. “This _can’t_ be happening.”

Oksana hums, her thumbs still stroking Eve’s face. A moment later, she stops, pulling away and taking one careful step back, pouting. “And we were having so much fun.”

Eve stares at her. “Oh, you _asshole_ ,” she says. She takes a step toward her, but Oksana leans elegantly away, her mouth twisting. She takes another step back when Eve moves again, and another for every step that follows, her eyes dancing in the light, shepherding Eve farther into the room until their chase ends at the bed. The backs of Oksana’s legs meet the side of the mattress, and she gives Eve’s lip one last, playful flick of her tongue, before she falls backward onto the bed, her eyes never leaving Eve’s.

Even from below, in the embrace of Eve’s shadow, Oksana is larger than life. Eve stands between her legs, towering over her, and loses herself in the golden flicker of her hair when she shifts on top of the sheets, in the lamp light wreathing her face. Oksana’s breathing has slowed down some, her chest rising and sinking steadily, and the urge to steal that breath away, to scoop it from her lungs, overcomes Eve once more.

She lowers herself slowly, settling in the cradle of Oksana’s hips. Eve kisses her, softly at first, then rough with intent, so that, by the time she pulls away again with Oksana’s bottom lip between her teeth, Oksana is gasping for air, desperate and beautiful. Eve abandons her mouth, kissing a path over the arch of her cheek and along her temple; her lips brush against Oksana’s earlobe, and Eve sharpens her teeth on the shell of her ear, weaving a fist into her hair and tightening.

Oksana’s mouth falls open, hips stuttering up into Eve’s. She moans deep in her throat, the sound vibrating through Eve where their chests are pressed together and sending a shock of arousal up her arms. She props herself up to look into Oksana’s face.

 _I did that_ , Eve thinks, marveling at Oksana, at the distress in her brow, eyes catching on her lips, bright red and wet as they frame her jagged breaths, _I did that_.

Eve touches her with exploding fingertips, then, months of pent-up want and desire spilling from her hands. She captures Oksana’s mouth in a hard kiss, her palms smoothing obsessively over her neck and her shoulders and down her chest, nails digging into muscle, extracting sweet, honeyed murmurs from Oksana’s mouth as her hips jump and squirm underneath Eve’s.

She’s just slipped her hands underneath Oksana’s shirt when Oksana sits up suddenly, tugging Eve close and lining the column of her throat with hot kisses as she pulls on the hem of Eve’s own shirt, dragging it up and over her head before tossing it aside, her trousers following shortly after. She grins, lowering her mouth to Eve’s body again, sucking a bruise into the curve of her breast.

The breath in Eve’s chest stills, her heart seizing anxiously. Before Oksana can do much more than place a kiss lower down her torso, Eve draws away. She pushes Oksana, forcing her toward the head of the bed, and climbs on top of her again once Oksana’s head hits the pillows.

“Oh?” Oksana raises an eyebrow. Her eyes flit between Eve’s, then down to her lips, fixing eventually on the purple spot developing on her chest. Oksana looks back into her eyes, her expression difficult to read in shadow. She’s still completely clothed underneath Eve, infuriatingly composed again as she idly fingers at Eve’s hips.

“Shut up,” Eve says, rolling her eyes. After a moment, Oksana’s face opens up and she smiles up at Eve. Without warning, she bends one of her knees, so that her thigh presses firmly in-between Eve’s legs.

Eve inhales sharply, her eyes slipping closed, a bolt of fire shooting down her spine. Oksana bursts into laughter. “Are you sure?” she says, brushing up against Eve again when Eve inadvertently sinks down onto her thigh.

Eve shoots her a glare. Oksana snickers, before her laughter cuts off abruptly into a groan as Eve buries her head in Oksana’s shoulder, sucking one of her own bruises into her neck. “Shut up,” she whispers into her perfumed hair.

Her hands sneak under Oksana’s shirt again, only just skimming the hot skin there, but Oksana grabs them and places Eve’s hands over her clothed breasts instead. Eve has just an instant to frown at that, and then Oksana’s hands squeeze around hers and she arches into Eve’s palms, panting.

Eve recalls a conversation over the phone she had with Elena, once, as she watches Oksana work herself up with Eve’s hands, the movement of her hips becoming more and more frantic as a flush wraps sunset around her collar. She’d asked Elena to describe the tits on serial killers to her – back when Villanelle was just a ghost. When Oksana didn’t exist. Eve has to fight the sudden, absurd urge to laugh.

Then, she remembers the conversation with Bill in Berlin, and moves before the thought can sober her.

Eve falls. She slips her hands out from under Oksana’s and brackets Oksana's head, pitching forward so that her face hovers only inches away from hers. Slowly, heated and decadent― _because she can_ ―Eve rolls her hips down into Oksana's. She swallows the whimper that springs from Oksana’s lips, licking up her tremulous breaths. Before Oksana can so much as respond in kind, Eve is sliding a hand between them. She rakes her nails down Oksana’s torso, undoing the catch in her trousers. And, without bothering to take them off, Eve slips her hand over Oksana.

Oksana’s reaction is instantaneous. She twists on top of the sheets, shuddering under Eve. Her hips jump again, seeking out the pressure of Eve’s fingers; Eve denies her for only half a second, before she winds past Oksana’s underwear and touches her directly.

It’s not caring or gentle, the way Eve has allowed herself to imagine it might have been in Paris, Oksana’s eyes dark and intent across the bed, the brush of her hand delicate against Eve’s cheek. Oksana is _wet_ beneath Eve’s fingers―unsure at first, but growing with confidence with each sound she manages to elicit with a simple stroke―warm as sin and velvet to the touch, but the motion of her body is violent, hard and frenzied against Eve, her grip on her waist greedy. Eve derives a faint kind of satisfaction from the fact that Oksana seems to like the same things she does.

When Eve’s thumb trips on her clit, Oksana tenses up and a strangled groan stumbles from her bruised lips. She pants against Eve’s mouth, says, “Again.”

Eve scoffs at her, even as her hips press steadily forward with each movement of her hand. Oksana laughs breathlessly at that, threading a hand through her own hair. She opens her mouth to say something, but before she can make another sound, Eve’s thumb presses against her again, deliberately this time, and a gasp topples off the serrated edge of Oksana’s laughter.

Eve moves over, under, around, and then her fingers descend.

She still doesn’t know what she’s doing, but it hardly seems to matter this time.

Hips tilted to the ceiling, Eve’s fingers inside her, Oksana comes on a moan.

 _I exist_ , Eve thinks. _I exist. I exist. I exist._

 

 

Oksana’s tongue is warm and wet and slippery on Eve’s skin, between her legs, against her clit, and it’s like lightning striking in the same place, once, twice, three times.

“Does this feel real enough for you?” she murmurs into the curve of her thigh.

 

 

Eve never does manage to get Oksana’s shirt off.

When she leaves in the morning, Oksana wakes her. She’s sitting on Eve’s side of the bed, hands resting by her sides, inches from Eve’s body.

She doesn’t touch Eve―Eve had woken up to Oksana calling her name―and she’s slipped back into the trousers Eve had gotten her out of the night before.

“I want to see you again,” Oksana says. Her eyes trace the path her fingers won’t over the sheets draped across Eve. In the early morning sunlight, Oksana is pale, her lips dark and full; the blackness of her eyes has melted away and her face is plain to read. Accessible, Eve thinks. Almost. “Would you like that?”

Eve peers into her honest face, the serious set of her mouth. She shoots a quick look at the dark marks peppering her neck, feeling each one like an ember glancing against her palms. She’s aware of it all, suddenly: the blood winding through her veins and the ache in her thighs; the heat of Oksana’s body beside them, and the pleasant pull of the sheets, tight against her body where Oksana is sitting. It’s nearly sweet, the way her chin rests sideways against her shoulder and she looks down at Eve. Eve’s eyes are on the closer of Oksana’s hands when she speaks.

“Yes.”

In her peripheral, Eve sees Oksana’s mouth move in the semblance of a smile. She hums, and the hand Eve is watching rises off the bed to move toward her, closer and closer, until Eve has to avert her gaze. She’s looking at Oksana when her fingers finally make contact, teasing a curl of Eve’s hair, her touch so slight that Eve almost wonders whether she’s imagining it.

The hair slithers into Eve’s line of sight and slips through Oksana’s fingers when she stands to leave.

Eve goes to work early that day. She arrives at the office to find Elena sitting at her desk already, examining an old case file.

“What’re you doing here so early?” Elena asks.

“Couldn’t sleep.” She slumps into the chair at her desk. “You?”

“Kenny snores,” Elena answers with a roll of her eyes, but she’s smiling.

Niko had, too. Eve clears her throat. “Speaking of Kenny,” she says, letting her hair curtain off her face and rummaging studiously through her handbag, “when he gets in, could you get him to take another look through the police reports from the last month or so?”

The rustle of paper coming from behind her stops. After a heart-stopping beat, Elena says, “Have you got something?”

Eve doesn’t look over. She’s unscrewing the lid on the thermos she dug out of her bag when she remembers the bottle of champagne, still sitting on the coffee table in her living room. Her chair creaks when she sits back. _Drinks with Eve_ , Eve thinks, _fuck her senseless._ Check.

She can’t entirely stifle the disbelieving little laugh that leaves her. “No,” Eve mutters, shaking her head, “I have absolutely nothing.”

 

 

Kenny doesn’t end up finding anything but, a week later, a new case brings Eve to Paris once more.

This time, Elena does go. They arrive in the morning―drop their bags off at the hotel first this time―and in the afternoon they go directly to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to meet with one of Jerry’s contacts at the DGSE. He walks them through the crime scene, although everything’s already been cleaned up: the pianist’s dressing room, where the victim’s throat had been slit, the concert hall the orchestra had been performing in that night.

“The only fingerprints we found on the instrument were those of _Madame_ Berger,” the agent explains. “We found her, after, drugged and tied up in her hotel room. She could not remember anything that happened, but confessed to having an affair with our _Monsieur_ Boivin. He was visiting her dressing room when he was killed.”

“And no one noticed the switch? Not even during the concert?” Elena asks.

The agent shrugs. “I am told she was very good.”

Eve and Elena exchange a look after he leaves.

“No use asking for an e-fit image,” Elena says. “If no one in the orchestra noticed an impostor, they’ll just describe the original pianist.”

“Do you have a picture of her?” Elena hands Eve her phone. She’s pale, thin, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Eve blows a frustrated huff and passes it back. “They don’t look anything alike. Do you think a wig maybe?”

Elena shrugs. “It could have been someone else altogether, for all we know.” She gestures at the grand piano that had been played for the concert, still standing opposite prompt. “Sat in the back? It’d be hard to tell.”

Eve walks the length of the stage, stopping to sit on the piano bench. “Someone’s turned it,” Eve calls out. “I can hardly see anything with the lid up.” She stands again, running her hand along the keys distractedly, not depressing, her fingers mimicking old patterns: white key, black key, white, black, two white, then black again.

“Did you ever play?” Elena asks, coming over to stand beside her.

“I had lessons as a kid. My mom was always more into it than my dad.”

“Do you think you could pose as a concert pianist?”

“God, no.” The theatrics, the extravagance of it all, make Eve think of Oksana. But what are the chances that Oksana would have classical training – that she’d play well enough a group of musicians, an entire audience, wouldn’t notice the difference? It would have come up, wouldn’t it? In their searches, the conversations with Anna, the constant _visits_ ―

“Surely, there were better options.”

Eve shakes herself. She looks up. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, couldn’t she have just snuck in as a guest? As one of the ushers or staff? Why go to all the trouble?”

“Same reason she did the whole fetish nurse thing?” Eve suggests.

Elena laughs. “What, to get your attention?”

Eve freezes up. Her hand halts on the keyboard, nails clicking against lacquer when her fingers curl involuntarily. She drops it and laughs stiffly along. “No, you ass.” Eve looks out on the stall seats to buy her heart some time to calm in her chest, at the dress circle hanging over them. “To get someone’s attention,” she says finally. “Anyone’s attention.”

Elena hums, unconvinced. “Did Anna play the piano?”

“No instruments in the house,” Eve answers, glad for the change in subject.

“No e-fit, no fingerprints,” Elena adds. “ _Maybe_ this is The Twelve, but it looks like they might just have sent someone new.”

“Maybe ...” But Eve thinks of Frank, of what he’d said in the safehouse. It’s ridiculous, it would be completely unsound, but Eve can’t help thinking The Twelve have been deliberately putting Oksana on all of their bigger-ticket assassinations; this fits the bill, and they have no more reason to deviate from that now than they had before.

“This could be a good thing, right? I mean,” Elena continues when Eve frowns at her, “we weren’t really getting anywhere with Villanelle―” Eve looks quickly away, focusing again on the piano, studying the glossy black, sloping shoulders framing the keys with undue interest, “―and this could be a potential new avenue to investigate. Kenny’s already got theories.”

By metro, the trip from the theater to where Oksana lived in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is less than half an hour; Eve checked. By taxi, even less. The orchestra has had regular engagements with the theater for longer than Oksana had lived there. It’s by no means definitive evidence, but ... Eve has to wonder.

She smiles gamely, asks, “Are they anything like his other theories?” which makes Elena laugh, and keeps her thoughts to herself.

Although it’s been over a year since Eve’s visited this city, since Eve has actually been in Paris with her, she sees Oksana everywhere she goes.

When Eve and Elena part ways for the afternoon, Eve half-expects Oksana to turn up suddenly outside one of the restaurants she passes in the street, waiting for Eve to join her, to see what she’d done. Oksana is in the people walking the sidewalks with her, in the wink of a woman’s hair on the metro, in the gleam of a stranger’s eyes.

About a year ago, Eve hardly would have been able to imagine Oksana in circumstances so mundane, even in her most delirious moments: not in the queues at coffeehouses to order drinks for Eve, nor ringing up in dirty corner shops around London. Eve wouldn’t have been able to imagine Oksana in her everyday life at all.

About a year ago, Eve had a loving husband. About a year ago, she’d never almost stabbed someone to death. About a year ago, Eve had never known Oksana.

But, a year in, it’s nearly normal, to expect Oksana somewhere close by. Sometimes, it’s even easy.

 

 

They still catch lunch at odd restaurants around the city.

Oksana prepares dinner―or brings take-away―on days they have sex, and they have breakfast most mornings after, if time permits. Some evenings, Oksana will simply sit by her side, like she had before, watch a movie with her, and then leave before the sun has even set fully in the sky. She touches Eve some nights, but it’s usually Eve who initiates sex, to Oksana’s great delight.

Oksana is attentive, interested in Eve and everything she does. It’s not surprising―Oksana has been feeling her out for months, waiting for Eve to push before pushing back―but it’s strangely unselfish.

Unexpectedly, Oksana seems to _care_. She respects the boundaries Eve sets, accommodates her wants and needs. She likes to lavish Eve with expensive wines, seems genuinely pleased when Eve enjoys them, beyond personal gratification.

Eve has no doubt that Oksana would not have waited on her forever, but she doesn’t think Oksana would have pressured her, either. Even now, Oksana is cautious, at once both confident that Eve wants her and careful, touching her, unprompted, only occasionally, content with what Eve gives her.

(Eve _does_ want her. Eve wants Oksana endlessly: Oksana’s chest pressed against Eve’s, Oksana’s body spread beneath her, Oksana’s neck underneath her fingers; Eve wants to be a perpetual fixture in Oksana’s mind, to know the shape of her own body because Oksana is touching it, to have Oksana’s eyes on her, always.)

And Oksana: Oksana offers herself up to Eve, earnest, open, as she steadily stitches herself further into the fabric of Eve’s lungs.

They’re at Hyde Park, and Oksana buys two overpriced hot chocolates at a nearby café to fight the chill. After waiting for Eve to take a sip of hers first, Oksana licks up all the cream in her cup, her enthusiasm almost endearing as she takes in their surroundings with bright eyes. Oksana takes her deeper into the park, past mothers pushing canopied prams and couples going for a stroll, until they come across a string quartet braving the cold.

“I think you will like this,” Oksana says, steering Eve toward them with a feather-light touch to her lower back. She appears not to feel the cold, absorbed in the performance while Eve hunches against the frigid wind. They listen to the quartet perform two long movements; it’s nice, in a surreal sort of way. Oksana drops a banknote into the collection tin before they leave, taking another winding path leading farther into the heart of the park.

“Do you like music?” Eve asks, after some time.

Oksana smiles, says, “I like classical music,” and watches Eve’s face for her reaction.

 

 

Eve asks for a table for two when she gets to the restaurant, a French bistro on the outskirts of southern London, next to the River Thames. Her waiter’s only just come back with the bread when Oksana joins her. She grabs a piece immediately, spreading it with butter.

Eve wonders whether she would have come in if Eve had told the hostess she was alone. “Long day?” she asks, watching her eat.

“Busy,” Oksana answers. “Heads-up.” She laughs quietly to herself.

When their waiter comes back, Oksana orders wine, but lets Eve do the tasting when he comes back with the bottle, and orders a starter alongside her entrée that Eve ends up eating most of.

Oksana asks after her life in the States, the relationships she had with her parents. It’s new; their conversations had been largely impersonal before. Eve supposes Oksana feels as though she’s allowed, now. It’s dry conversation, but Oksana seems fascinated, as she is by even the most banal things having to do with Eve.

“What about your colleagues?”

Eve shifts in her seat. “What about them?”

“They are together, no?” Oksana points out. Eve stiffens. “What―”

“What about Konstantin?” Eve interrupts. “Is he still alive? Is he still your handler?”

Oksana blinks. “You want to talk about work, Eve?” she asks, laughter curving her mouth.

“I want to talk about you.”

Oksana looks at her, her smile stuck on her face, eyes darting between Eve’s. She relaxes after a few seconds, putting her cutlery down and propping her cheek up against her fist. “What do you want to know?”

It’s the anxiety still curling in her chest, the abrupt fear that had taken hold of it at the mention of Elena and Kenny, that makes Eve say, “I want to know how you felt when you killed him.”

“Who?” Eve doesn’t elaborate, but Oksana seems to understand. She hums, watching the patrons sitting at the other tables, taking particular interest in a group of friends. Her fingers stroke the thin neck of her fork, delicate; the thought that they’ve killed before is suddenly jarring to Eve, ill-matched to the gentleness of her touch. “Do you really want to know?” she asks.

Eve tries to summon her usual bluster, but her words tumble, feeble, from her mouth. “I―yes, I do.”

Oksana throws Eve a smile before turning back to the other guests, watching them interact for a long minute. “I want to ask you a question,” she says instead of answering.

Eve frowns in the uneasy silence that follows, but waits. Oksana is still watching the group of friends when she says, “You stabbed me. What did you feel?”

“I―” Oksana’s focus switches to Eve with startling speed, eyes intent on her face. Her fingers stop, and she sits like a statue, even the motion of her chest subdued, waiting for Eve’s response.

In the moment, when Eve had plunged the knife into Oksana, in the seconds after, when she’d climbed on top of her and Eve had both hands wrapped around the handle, resting in the warm seat of Oksana’s stomach – there’d been only the rush of being with her. Of being the one doing this to her.

Oksana had been murdering people for _years_ , had gone unnoticed by scores of agents, before Eve came along. She’s brilliant at her job, intelligent, just careful enough. And it had been Eve.

It had been Eve, _Eve_ who found her, Eve who lured her into bed, Eve who would kill her.

And then that moment had ended, and _Oksana_ ―

“Tell me what you are thinking,” Oksana says, her voice almost breathless, the expression on her face transported. Her eyes are molten amber in the lights of the restaurant―catlike, Eve remembers―wild and restless on Eve. “Tell me what you felt.”

Eve stares at her. At her face, the sharp angle of her jaw. She circles her mouth, skates along the cut of her shirt and the arch of her neck. Finally, Eve’s eyes teeter on the table’s edge, where the wood swallows up the rest of Oksana’s body: her hips, her thighs, her waist.

The places where Eve has been inside of her.

 

 

Oksana’s not in the country―a scattered string of recent murders suggests she’s been busy in Northern Europe―when Eve pulls her old suitcase out from under her bed for the first time in over a year.

It’s been a trying week: the bodies dropping left and right up north form their little operation’s first pattern, and it’s put Jerry and everyone at the office on edge. So, Eve indulges herself.

She’s got a glass of wine in one hand―one of her favourites off the shelf of the local grocery―and she’s unzipping with the other, letting the slider click, click, click slowly against each of the individual teeth. Layer after layer of soft fabric meet the touch of her hands, but it isn’t the clothes Oksana gave her that Eve is interested in.

She almost expects it to smell bad – to smell different, at the very least.

But _La Villanelle_ smells the same as it had before, just as Eve remembers it.

 

 

Jerry makes his second visit to their office a month into the new year.

It’s miserable outside, the rain coming down in freezing bullets that the cold turns to ice, laying sheets of it across the streets and sidewalks of central London. They hear Jerry swear, squeaking his way up the narrow staircase in the building, and when Kenny opens the door, he’s wrapped up in a scarf several lengths too large, the visible parts of his face ruddy, and still trying to fold up his mangled umbrella. Eve laughs at the sight, but she quietens when she sees the look on his face.

Eve had always thought of Jerry as a jovial sort of man. At the dinner parties Eve attends with the Martens and Elena on occasion, he tries to make her feel welcome―where Kenny is too shy to step up to the task―and his shouts of laughter are always the first and last sounds of the night. Jerry’s seriousness now is unsettling, his sombre expression reminding Eve that he was brought up in a family with a longstanding history in the MI6, that he was an officer before he was an agent, and that he was appointed Deputy Director for a reason. All of the air is sucked out of the room before he even opens his mouth to speak.

Carolyn is not chained to the table when they arrive at Vauxhall Cross, but there are two guards standing just outside the door and the sun is weak behind the storm clouds outside, its light faint, casting the room in dirty greys. She’s sat on one side of the table, while the four of them gather on the other. They remain standing when it’s clear Kenny’s too worked up to sit; he paces the length of the table, hands fidgeting, slowly calming down on his own.

Elena knows better than to comfort him here, now. Carolyn doesn’t look at him at all.

“You were detained,” Jerry begins dispassionately, although Eve can see his jaw clenching, “at twenty-four minutes past ten on the second of February, at the Berlin Brandenburg airport. You were trying to board a flight to Moscow. What were you going to do there?” Carolyn doesn’t answer; Jerry tries again. “We’ve recovered CCTV footage of you meeting with the executives of two different tech firms in Berlin. Tell us what you discussed.”

Carolyn stares at the wall behind them. “Surely, you cannot be expecting me to talk,” she says blandly.

“The diplomat in Paris, Jean-Loup Boivin,” Eve interjects before Jerry can respond. “The pianist. Was that Villanelle?”

The pitter patter of rain against the roof and windows is loud and incessant, but it doesn’t entirely drown out the note of derision in Carolyn’s voice. “Oh,” she says with all the nonchalance in the world, but that derision is there, “do you still call her that?”

Eve’s next words die on her lips. She goes rigid, mouth going slack as her arms fall out of the cross they form over her chest. Carolyn moves, glancing at Eve’s face. She seems to find what she’s looking for, and turns away again.

It all happens quickly enough that no one notices anything amiss. Eve unsticks her throat and rearranges her expression. She shoves the new questions swirling in her head to the back of her mind in time to hear Jerry ask, “Who else? How many involved?”

Carolyn does not dignify that with a response except to say, in a scathing tone, “Really, George.”

“What about Konstantin?” Elena pushes. “Is he still alive?”

Carolyn swivels to look at her. “You know, you turned out rather more impressive than I initially thought.” Eve looks at Elena from the corner of her eye, but she’s stony-faced and serious, unfazed by the compliment.

“Why are The Twelve operating so openly?” Eve asks. “Why do they _want_ MI6 to know about them?”

Jerry, caught up in the interrogation, doesn’t question Eve or her assumption, but Elena sends her a sharp look. Her eyes drill into the side of Eve’s face, searching. She stares at her for five long seconds, before focusing back on Carolyn when the quiet stretches.

Carolyn doesn’t answer, not even to taunt Eve again. She and Elena exchange helpless looks with Jerry; his gaze wanders, lingering momentarily on the men standing outside.

It’s Kenny who breaks the silence, speaking for the first time since their arrival. His arms are tight around himself, hands gripping his shoulders, and his words burst unrestrained and angry from his mouth, the disappointment and betrayal of the last year and a half spilling forth. “Why?” he asks. “ _Why?_ ”

Carolyn looks at him, then, tired, defiant. She’ll likely never see the outside of a prison cell again, Eve realizes, once this is all over. She won’t get to enjoy the fruits of her labour. To see what this has all been about, what it’s all been for.

Eve had never quite thought of Carolyn as old before, despite her extensive record, her success; she seemed to exist beyond the confines of linear time. But, sat in the middle of their badly-lit cage, hands locked up in fists on the table between them, her face looks drawn, weathered and fading, and Eve wonders when the last time she felt truly alive was.

“Does it matter?” Carolyn says.

 

 

“How would you kill me, if you had to?”

Oksana looks down at her incredulously. “What?” Her voice is a little shaky and her fingers spasm near her hips, like she was going to tug on Eve’s hair but thought better of it.

“How would you kill me?”

Oksana stares. And Eve knows, with absolute and utter certainty, that Oksana would kill her if asked. She can only hope there’d be some fleeting kind of regret.

“I would persuade you into killing yourself,” Oksana answers finally, and her hands do make contact with Eve’s hair this time – resting on top of, not pulling.

Eve snorts, disgusted; feels bad about it for a fraction of a second when she remembers Anna. “Like I would ever do that.”

Oksana doesn’t respond for a while. Eve’s hand moves again, traces a snake up the inside of her thigh, slides up and up and up. “No,” she says, breath hitching softly when Eve’s fingers coil inside her, “I do not think you would.”

 

 

(Eve would do it all the same way, except she wouldn’t chop Oksana up into bits and flush her down a toilet.

She’d set her up in bed, like before, plant one of Oksana’s own knives in her stomach so that there’d be absolutely no mistaking the thing for self-defense, this time.

Eve would make a hole in her skin, part the muscles in her chest, and excise a rib from the cage in her side.)

 

 

Oksana kisses Eve like she’ll never kiss her again.

She kisses her like she’d like to know Eve, like she’d like to devour her from the outside, in. She kisses her like every single touch of their lips is a necessity, as though, with a single missed kiss, Eve might blink out of existence. Oksana kisses her like she’d like to do it in front of every damn CCTV camera in London.

She’s thorough, slow, lets her lips sketch over every crease in Eve’s, as if she’s trying to memorize them, trying to trace every single tastebud on her tongue.

Oksana kisses her like it’ll never be enough.

She plays a scale along Eve’s rib cage, plunking across each bone and the troughs between them. It’s absentminded, easy rather than remembered: thumb, middle finger, thumb, middle, thumb, index, middle.

1-3-1-3-1-2-3. God, Eve doesn’t know her at all.

Oksana pulls back, lips splitting to expose a toothy grin. It’s a game, it’s always just a game.

“I’m going to call you Eve, okay?” she says.

 

 

The moon is on the tail end of full in the sky, bright, but waning. The light splashes against the bedroom walls in swathes and splinters, washing the room in shades of silver.

Eve runs her fingers through Oksana’s hair, loose and spilling across the space between them, painting soft sunlight over the streaks of moonlight cutting up the bed.

In the before and after, it’s so easy to remember herself. To remember what they do, the things they’ve done – the things they’ve done to each other. It’s why Eve hates these moments; it’s why she likes them best.

“Sometimes,” she says, sweeping the hair away from Oksana’s neck, following the fabric draped across her shoulders with her eyes, “I look at you, and all I see is this _thing_. A monster who’s murdered countless people, who killed my best friend. Just a _thing_.”

“Only sometimes?” Oksana asks, twisting to throw a glance over her shoulder at Eve, eyes wide and shining with amusement. She rolls over again before Eve can scowl at her.

In the semidarkness, Oksana’s shoulder blades ripple exquisitely as she settles back into her original position on the bed, her shirt fluttering in the places around them. She stills.

“And what,” she says, “do you see the other times?”

 

 

They’re not so different: the sound Oksana makes when Eve’s fingers press into her, and the sound she makes when a knife’s been pushed into her stomach.

 

 

Eve and Elena huddle together, sides pressed together to share their body heat. It’s cold out, even for London in early spring, but they haven’t escaped the office or its smell in a while.

They’re sitting in a barren little courtyard just around the corner from Trafalgar Square. It’s a few blocks down from the office; Eve’s not dared to spend time with Oksana in this place before.

The wooden slats in their bench dig into Eve’s legs, rough and cold through the fabric of her tights. Elena made sandwiches and mash, and she brought a flask of hot chocolate she made from scratch the night before. It’s nice. It’s normal.

It’s so nice.

“No leads?”

“None,” Eve answers easily. Elena doesn’t even have to ask – they haven’t found a single thing for months. “I don’t think even Carolyn knows what’s going on anymore. It’s so much bigger than any of us.”

Elena nods slowly, stuffing her hands in her pockets and watching people on their lunch breaks bustle by.

“And Villanelle?”

There’s a moment where Eve forgets who Villanelle even was. Who she is. The cold air stills in Eve’s chest. “What about her?”

“Any leads? Surprise visits?” Elena asks, still turned away.

“I―no―no, I would have told you and Kenny.”

A group of suits cross in front of them, talking over each other, their breath gathering in white clouds around them. Elena and Eve both watch them go, waiting, until only Elena’s breath mists the air.

“I remember how we used to complain about our jobs at MI5,” she says at last. “How you used to work on cases in secret because you’d finished your work and you were so _bored_.” Elena gathers her jacket tightly around herself. “You were so bored. Then this MI6 thing happened, and you called me the minute you heard, just―freaking the fuck out. It was the most excited you’d been in years.”

The seconds tick by. It’s not the longest conversation they’ve had in a while, but it’s a close thing. At some point, Eve checked out – she knows it. Kenny and Elena look to her for direction now, and Eve, well.

Eve has been treading water for some time, now, and she’s starting to lose momentum.

“You’re less focused.” Elena shivers. She grabs the flask, holds it in both hands and cradles it in her lap. “Before, it was like it was the only thing in your life, the need to find this girl and―fuck, I don’t know, do whatever it is you wanted to do with her.”

Eve doesn’t say anything. She pulls the sleeves of her coat over her hands, rubs her thigh in the spot where the flask had warmed it.

“You have her.” Elena says it like a statement, still not looking at Eve, like she’s talking to herself; like she can’t bear to look at her. “You have her, you won.”

“I―” Eve lets out a loud breath, purses her lips and doesn’t speak. This seems to scare Elena more than anything. She finally turns back in toward the bench, ducking to look Eve in the eye, anxious, fearing the worst.

“You’re not―she’s not forcing you into anything, is she? She’s there because you want her there?”

“No, no,” Eve reassures her, “it’s not like that.” Elena huffs out a sigh of relief, falling bonelessly back into the bench with a thump. Eve follows, lets her head pillow itself on the hood of her coat, face turned up toward the sky. A moment later, Elena’s head knocks against hers. She loops an arm through Eve’s, places the flask between them again.

“You know I’ll follow you anywhere, right?” she says. “I mean, at first I was only in it for Carolyn of course, but now that she’s fucked off with the Russians ...” Eve laughs; it comes out choked, splutters from her mouth wet and raw, like it took the wrong bend climbing up her throat.

“You won,” Elena says again, “you have her. What else have you got to prove, Eve?”

 

 

They’re lying in bed, still clothed. In the low light, Oksana’s eyes glisten.

Glass eyes, Eve thinks. Tap tap tap, and they’d break.

“You would not make a very good killer,” says Oksana.

“I would!” argues Eve, affronted. She _could_. She’s just as smart, just as capable. “I nearly killed you, I―”

Oksana grabs her hand before she can finish speaking, lifting the hem of her own shirt, and places it so that Eve’s palm falls somewhere near the button in her trousers. The pads of Eve’s index and middle fingers press into soft skin.

There’s a scar just above her bellybutton, a puckered bud of skin, sort of pink against the pale stretch of Oksana’s stomach.

 _I did that_ , Eve thinks, and then: _god, I did that_.

“You would not,” Oksana says again.


End file.
